Month: February 2007

Antiwar Radio: Gordon Prather

Nuclear Physicist Dr. Gordon Prather explains America’s relations with North Korea over the past 13 years, how Clinton made a deal with them, how Bush broke it and has now capitulated. Also, what a lousy “reporter” David Sanger is.

MP3 here. (39:03)

Physicist James Gordon Prather has served as a policy implementing official for national security-related technical matters in the Federal Energy Agency, the Energy Research and Development Administration, the Department of Energy, the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Department of the Army. Dr. Prather also served as legislative assistant for national security affairs to U.S. Sen. Henry Bellmon, R-Okla. – ranking member of the Senate Budget Committee and member of the Senate Energy Committee and Appropriations Committee. Dr. Prather had earlier worked as a nuclear weapons physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico.

I don’t even have to ask if you’re sick of Andrew Sullivan. Who isn’t? Here he is reminding Condi Rice of her past opposition to open-ended interventionism, but what I want to know is: who is Sullivan to dredge up someone’s old writings and point to their present-day inversion? The grand old man of inversion has stood his old opinion about the war on its head, and, somehow, we’re not supposed to notice it.

At the height of the war hysteria, Sullivan set himelf up as a self-appointed literary censor, who detected treason between the lines of this poem, and, when corrected as to the author’s clear intent, refused to back down. Here is someone who called for dropping a nuclear bomb or two on Iraq because he knew — he just knew! — that Iraq was behind the anthrax attacks.

Today, Sullivan bemoans Iraq’s tragic fate, as if he and his fellow war-hawks had nothing to do with it. Yesterday he smeared anyone who questioned the war — or the larger neocon project of forcibily “democratizing” the Middle East — as part of a “fifth column.” Today, he gets up on his high horse and berates the Secretary of State for once writing that when it comes to military intervention, we must know “how and when to get out.” Correct me if I”m wrong, but wasn’t Sullivan’s one of the loudest voices in favor of us getting in there to begin with?

What I want to know is this: Sullivan is supposed to be an a serious Catholic, right? So what kind of penance has he done? He should at least refrain from citing the past inconsistencies of the very public officials he egged on as they led us over a precipice.

Richard Goldstein, writing in the Village Voice about a talk Sullivan gave in the summer of 2001, succinctly summarized the key to his success: “He has always depended on the amnesia of his audience to cover his tracks.”

At this point, his readership must have dwindled down to only the very seriously impaired. Odds are that’s why Time magazine dumped him and his increasingly tiresome blog on The Atlantic — they’re sick of him, too….

[For the first in the “People I’m Sick Of” blog-series, go here: for the second, go here.]

I could write an entire series of blog posts around the theme “People I’m Sick Of.” As a matter of fact, I think I will ….

You can read the first entry in the series here. And while I’m on the subject, there’s somebody else whose undeserved fame and political pontifications are as irritating as — well, as Arianna Huffington’s. I’m talking about Camille Paglia, author of Sexual Personae, a head-ache-producing tome of inordinate length and middlebrow airs, who, in the first installment of her revived monthly “column” for Salon.com, has this to say about the death of Anna Nicole Smith :

ABC’s “Nightline” called via my publisher for comment, but I felt far too upset to go on TV. Nevertheless, I was riveted to the tube all night and didn’t mind in the least that this tabloid drama, with its mythic themes of ambiguous paternity and contested wealth, had pushed Iraq to the back burner.

Yeah, right, Camille: it’s perfectly okay that we should look away from the horrific mess we’ve created in Iraq — a country that never threatened us, couldn’t threaten us, and posed no threat to its neighbors, and yet which we continue to violate and torture with impunity — to feast our eyes on the spectacle of our own decadence. But, of course, Camille is in favor of decadence, as she’s told us many times — her own celebrity yet another indication that our over-ripeness is practically terminal.

P.S. Oh, and don’t forget how Paglia backed away from raising her voice in protest against the war back when it really counted. In an interview with Salon.com [February 7, 2003] , she was asked why more public figures weren’t speaking out about the war, both pro and con. Her answer was that she didn’t want to be put in the same category as “the intellectuals like Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky who’ve made a career abroad out of anti-Americanism. Sontag’s made no secret of her lifelong adulation of all things European. My take is different: My immigrant family escaped poverty in Italy, and so I look at America in a very positive, celebratory way. So I’m reluctant to become part of this easy chorus of anti-Americanism. I also don’t want to do anything to undermine national morale, if we are indeed going to war. It’s wrong to be divisive when families have parents or children in danger on the front lines. I don’t want to add to their grief.”

Ah, but she doesn’t mind being “divisive” now that’s it’s popular to be against the war — and to heck with anyone’s grief, eh Camille?

Is anybody else as sick of Arianna Huffington as I am? She was obnoxious as an ostensibly conservative Republican, predictably bizarre as a California cultist, and now that she’s the doyenne of the Hollywood trendy-wendy Left she’s even more galling than ever. Check out her most recent post on Barack Obama, whose candidacy she’s pushing, in the course of which she manages to indulge both her liberal myopia and her odd fixation on Tim Russert:

Picking up the rhetorical shank bone, and accepting Obama’s substance anorexia as a given, Russert asked, “Is there now a second phase of the coverage of Barack Obama where reporters and voters will start demanding from him real specifics on the real challenges confronting our country and world?”

It makes me wonder: don’t these guys own a computer? If they took the time to surf the websites of any of the candidates, they’d see that the presidential campaign is already awash in real specifics on all kinds of real challenges. Indeed, they should go to barackobama.com right now and click on ‘Issues.” They’ll see something called “Plan to End the War in Iraq,” which is… a plan to end the war in Iraq. But maybe the war isn’t a real enough challenge for Russert.

Really, dah-link, do click on that link promising a “plan to end the war in Iraq,” and what do you find? This:

The plan allows for a limited number of U.S. troops to remain in Iraq as basic force protection, to engage in counter-terrorism and to continue the training of Iraqi security forces. If the Iraqis are successful in meeting the 13 benchmarks for progress laid out by the Bush Administration, this plan also allows for the temporary suspension of the redeployment, provided Congress agrees that the benchmarks have been met.

So, according to Obama and his Hollywood friends, we have to “redeploy” — never withdraw — starting next year, but only if the Iraqis persist in failing to be “successful” in meeting 13 mysteriously unspecified “benchmarks.” The “redeployment” will end, however, if and when the Iraqis start acting like good colonial subjects and kiss our asses in 13 different positions. And, in any case, we aren’t really leaving, you silly goose — that’s what “redeployment” is all about, don’tcha know. We’ll always have a “limited number” of troops garrisoning the Green Zone, just enough for the Democrats to claim that they’re not “cutting and running.” More than enough, in short, to keep the Iraqi government on the American leash — and, perhaps, give the insurgents enough of a target to emulate Beirut, 1983.

With an “antiwar” candidate like Obama, what do we need John McCain for? This “plan” is a recipe for a semi-permanent occupation.

I say send we send Arianna, and a “limited number” of the Hollywood Left, to “train” the Iraqis to jump through hoops and leap over “benchmarks.” That way we’ll be spared having to listen to her cocktail-party smalltalk elevated to the level of serious political discourse.

P.S. Oh, yes, and don’t forget Obama’s refusal to rule out going to war with Iran (and Pakistan!) …

Antiwar Radio: Daniel Ellsberg

The man who leaked the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg calls on national government employees to take secret documents pertaining to the upcoming war with Iran and give them to the Congress and the press as a last ditch effort to stop this war.

MP3 here. (50: 27)

Daniel Ellsberg was born in Detroit in 1931. After graduating from Harvard in 1952 with a B.A. summa cum laude in Economics, he studied for a year at King’s College, Cambridge University, on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Between 1954 and 1957, Ellsberg spent three years in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander.

From 1957-59 he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard in 1962 with his thesis, Risk, Ambiguity and Decision, a landmark in decision theory which was recently published. In 1959, he became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, and consultant to the Defense Department and the White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making. He joined the Defense Department in 1964 as Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs), John McNaughton, working on Vietnam. He transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, evaluating pacification on the front lines.

On return to the RAND Corporation in 1967, he worked on the Top Secret McNamara study of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000 page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; in 1971 he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, which led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon.

Since the end of the Vietnam War, Daniel has continued to be a leading voice of moral conscience, serving as a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, government wrongdoing and the urgent need for patriotic whisteblowing.

To encourage national security whistleblowing, Daniel launched the Truth-Telling Project in 2004 with “A Call to Patriotic Whistleblowing.” The Project aims to reach current government insiders, journalists, lawyers, lawmakers, and the American public with an urgent appeal for revealing the truth about government cover-up and lies before the next war. Collaborating with the ACLU, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), the Project on Government Oversight, and other organizations, the Truth-Telling Project provides a personal and legal support network for government insiders considering becoming truth-tellers.

Daniel’s book Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers reached bestseller lists across the nation. It won the PEN Center USA Award for Creative Nonfiction, the American Book Award, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Association Prize for Non-Fiction, and was a Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

In 2005 the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation awarded Daniel their first Fellowship for his lifetime commitment and continued efforts toward the advancement of peace, nuclear disarmament, and truth-telling.

In August 2005 the Ellsberg Fund for Truth Telling was established to enable Daniel to continue the work he is uniquely qualified to do as a prominent whisteblower—speaking, writing and activism to encourage more national security whistleblowing and to alert the nation to the dangers of government abuses of power.

In December 2006 Daniel was awarded the 2006 Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” in Stockholm, Sweden. He was acknowledged “for putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to a movement to free the world from the risk of nuclear war.” (Read his acceptance speech here.)

Daniel continues to serve as a public speaker, giving lectures at conferences and universities, and countless press, radio and Internet interviews. His recent essay, “The Next War”, featured in the October 2006 issue of Harpers magazine, urges government officials to reveal truths about government secrecy and nuclear planning—with documents—to avert a possible attack on Iran.

Daniel Ellsberg lives in Northern California with his wife, Patricia Marx Ellsberg. Their son, Michael Ellsberg, is a freelance developmental editor and lives in Buenas Aires. His oldest son, Robert Ellsberg, is publisher and editor-in-chief of Orbis Books. His daugher, Mary Carroll Ellsberg, is senior program officer of the Program for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH). He has 5 grandchildren.

Daniel is currently working on a nuclear memoir on the dangers of the nuclear policies of the U.S. and other nuclear states and a call for worldwide nuclear glasnost.

Antiwar Radio: Philip Giraldi

Former CIA agent and American Conservative magazine contributing editor Philip Giraldi confronts America’s march to war with Iran.

MP3 here. (29:55)

Philip Giraldi served as a staff officer in the Central Intelligence Agency for sixteen years, culminating in his selection as Chief of Base in Barcelona from 1989 to 1992. He was designated the Agency’s senior officer for Olympic Games support, and was named official liaison to the Spanish Security and Intelligence services. During the lead-up to the Games, he also expanded his liaison activities through contacts with the Security Services of a number of European, Asian, and Latin American countries. Working closely with the Barcelona Olympics Security Committee, Phil helped develop the overall Olympics security plan and became the principal briefing officer on security preparations for the United States Government. Prior to Barcelona, Phil specialized in intelligence collection and counter-terrorism operations throughout the Middle East and Europe, often working in coordination with the local government security services. In Istanbul, he successfully worked against a number of Middle Eastern terrorist targets. In Hamburg, he developed information on illegal technology sales in Western Europe. In Rome, he ran operations focused on economic espionage and counter-terrorism.

Since 1992, Phil has been engaged in security consulting for a number of Fortune 500 corporate clients. He is the founder and President of San Marco International, an international security consultancy, and is also a partner in Cannistraro Associates of McLean, Virginia.

Over the past four years, he has specialized in post-September 11th issues for his clients and has also done contract work for the United States government. Phil has been designated by the General Accounting Office as an expert on the impact of illegal immigration on terrorism. As a counter-terrorism expert, he has been brought in to assist the Port Authority of the City of New York in its planning, has assisted the United Nations security organization, and has helped develop a security training program for the United States Merchant Marine. He has conducted security surveys at a number of international airports and ports in Latin America and Asia.

Phil was one of the first American civilians to travel to Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and he has assisted multinational corporations in the upgrade of their security at overseas sites to help them comply with the Patriot Act. Prior to September 11th, he specialized in international risk assessments and “due diligence” investigations. In many cases, his investigations have developed information that led to corporate decisions not to go ahead with planned overseas joint ventures. To meet the needs of clients, he has traveled extensively, most particularly in Latin America, south Asia, and Europe, and has built up a world-wide network of working-level contacts in the security, political, and economic sectors.

Phil is a recognized authority on international security and counterterrorism issues. He appears frequently on National Public Radio and is a Contributing Editor who writes a regular column called “Deep Background” on terrorism, intelligence, and security issues for The American Conservative magazine. He has written op-ed pieces for the Hearst Newspaper chain, has appeared on “Good Morning America,” MSNBC, and local affiliates of ABC television. Phil has been a keynote speaker at the Petroleum Industry Security Council annual meeting. He has been interviewed by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the British Broadcasting Corporation, FOX News, 60 Minutes, and Court TV. He also prepares and edits a nationally syndicated subscription service newsletter on September 11th issues for corporate clients.

Phil was awarded an MA and PhD from the University of London in European History, and also holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honors from the University of Chicago. He speaks Spanish, Italian, German, and Turkish.